As Facebook expands, with 250 million users posting 1 billion pieces of content every week, the site continues to draw sharp criticism from privacy advocates, lawyers, and governments over how it uses the data that members regularly – and often cavalierly – post onto the site.

This week five California Facebook users joined the chorus of critics. In a lawsuit filed Monday, they charge that Facebook – the Web's dominant social networking ecosystem – unlawfully used their private information or intellectual property without consent.

What's more, they claim, Facebook is merely a data mining and marketing machine that masquerades as a social networking service.

Facebook has become omnipresent on the Web. "At least one family member in nearly every internet-savvy household is on it," says Leslie Harris, CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, writing this week on Wired.com.

The breakneck growth of the site over the past five years has come with intense scrutiny. Facebook has been criticized for how it has shared user information not only with third-party vendors but also between users not in one another's network. Facebook does collect user information to share with third parties, according to its terms of service.

Some users have complained that their images have been usurped unknowingly and used in advertisements that appear on the site. One married user's image was recently placed on an ad for "hot singles" – an ad that subsequently appeared on her husband's Facebook page.

Only about 20 percent of members use Facebook's privacy settings to control who can view their personal information. But even with strict privacy controls, it's tough to prevent how your images will be used, experts say.

Privacy groups and some of the site's own members have vigilantly monitored Facebook policies. When Facebook changed its terms of service earlier this year – a revision that appeared to give it broad ownership over users' content even after they...

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...information.
But, the point that many users fail to understand is that whatever the controls on offer, Facebook, at the end of the day, has access to all this information. The company is making use of all this information, to generate multi billion dollars.
Facebook has received criticism on a wide range of issues, including, online privacy, child safety, hate speech and the inability to terminate accounts without first manually deleting the content. In 2008, many companies removed their advertising from the site because it was being displayed on the pages of individuals and groups they found controversial.
The debate and discussion regarding Facebook’s privacy control is as old as the social network itself. But, what is now bringing this issue to the fore again is the slew of controversial plans announced by Facebook.
Major Privacy Issues: -
• Date mining-
People has a perception that Facebook is selling all the Costumers or users information to many Add agency’s, Surveys agency’s etc. and making lots of profits in to there pockets
• Cooperation with government search requests-
As Government and local authorities rely on Facebook and other social networks to investigate crimes and obtain evidence to help establish a crime, provide location information, establish motives, prove and disprove alibis, and reveal communications....

...﻿Facebook: Opportunities
and Challenges
UKOLN: Supporting the Cultural Heritage Sector
Why The Interest In Facebook?
Facebook has generated much interest over recent months. Much of the interest has arisen since Facebook announced the Facebook Platform [1] which enabled third party developers to build applications which could be used within the Facebook environment.
Since Facebook was developed initially to support students it is not surprising that student usage has proved so popular. This interest has also spread to other sectors within institutions, with researchers and members of staff exploring Facebook possibilities.
What Can Be Done Within Facebook?
Social networks such as Facebook can provide a range of benefits to members of an organisation:
Connections with peers: The main function of Facebook is to provide connections between people with similar interests. Friends can then send messages to each other (either closed messages or open for others to read).
Groups: Facebook users can set up discussion group areas, which can be used by people with interests in the topic of the group. Creation of details of events, which allows users to sign up to, is another popular use of Facebook.
Sharing resources: Many of the popular Facebook applications are used for sharing...

...﻿People use Facebook for many reasons; some of them consider it the vehicle to communicate with their friends, including old friends or current friends; some agree that it also helps them relax when they are stressful; others, on the other hand, might argue that Facebook brings distractions to them (Facebook 101). For instance, my friend, a quite person, did not socialize with people in both real life and in the Internet community. However, after knowing Facebook in a short period of time, he became addicted to it. He used most of his time to chat with friends, to play games, and to stare at his Facebook profile. Now, his friends list comes up to 300 and he daily logs on Facebook from 3 to 4 hours a day.
Hopefully, this research of our group will help college students get better understanding of the role of Facebook in students’ lives. Moreover, not only students in general but also people of all ages will gain their cognitive of the advantages and disadvantages of Facebook. The research will benefit reader to determine whether Facebook is good or bad for human being. Furthermore, if people use it as a habit or want to check of how frequently they use it, they could apply this research as an important source to figure out whether they are addicted to Facebook or not, or where they are in the rank.
Hypotheses:...

...I’ll “Facebook” You Later: The Effects of Facebook in Young People’s Lives
Cynthia Vasquez
Northwood University
Abstract
In the past ten years, the breakthroughs of the Internet have lead to the creation of online social networks. Founded in 2004, Facebook has become the most popular social network in the past few years. It has created a new way for people to communicate and socialize. Either by “posting” on their friends’ “walls” or by videoconferencing, users can leave them a message. However, the nonstop use of Facebook is becoming a discussed issue among our society. Youth are using Facebook to procrastinate on their daily tasks. Checking their Facebook profile is now part of their daily lives. This issue may cause them to get distracted constantly, consume golden time, lose privacy, change their daily habits, and, sometimes, even damage their computer’s operating system. This paper discusses the positive and the negative effects that the excessive use of Facebook may cause to our young generation.
Keywords: social network, Facebook, negative effects, young people, logged in
I’ll “Facebook” You Later: The Effects of Facebook in Young People’s Lives
During 2008, I remember talking to my friend Patricia and she told...

...ease of use.
Facebook is a social networking website that was originally designed for college students, but is now open to anyone 13 years of age or older. Facebook users can create and customize their own profiles with photos, videos and information about themselves. Friends can browse the profiles of other friends and write messages on their pages.
Each Facebook profile has a “wall”, where friends can post comments. Since the wall is viewable by all the user’s friends, wall postings are basically a public conversation. Therefore, it is usually best not to write personal messages on your friends’ walls. Instead, you can send a person a private message, which will show up in his or her private Inbox, similar to an e-mail message.
Facebook allows each user to set privacy setting, which by default are pretty strict. For example if you have not added a certain person as friend, that person will not be able to view your profile. However, you can adjust the privacy settings to allow users within your network (such as your college or area you live) to view part or all your profile. You can also create a “limited profile”, which allows you to hide certain parts of your profile from a list of users that you select. If you don’t want certain friends to be able to view your full profile, you can add them to your “limited profile” list.
Facebook is one of the top social networking sites, quickly gaining...

...Children on Facebook
Children on Facebook
EN3220
February 27, 2013
What is the problem?
Bullying, Stalking, Unrealistic expectations, Skewed Realities, and Misunderstandings these are the problems that plague Social Networking Sites. These problems have always existed in the world, but now only have recently appeared in social networking sites. Early iterations of social networking sites appeared in the mid to late 90’s sites like Gecocites and Tripod, and Theglobe allowed users to create little communities within their domain (Kawkins, 2011). Other sites stated adding new features to make it easy to quickly add new friend’s base on what friends the user has as friends on their account.
Flash forward to the year early 2000’s, MySpace has been fighting legal issues for privacy violations and a new Social Networking Site has been created called Facebook. With so many social networking sites why make Facebook a target? The answer is simple and the most integrated into everyone’s lives is simply the biggest one of them all. A user cannot even go to most sites without the site asking the user if user wants to link the Facebook account to their site. Some websites even requires the user to have a Facebook account to even use there site. They do this for two main reasons, to collect information on users and all friends list and to get advisements post to try to get even more...

...﻿The Benefits of Facebook
Lecturer:
Professional Written Communications
BA Accounting
Date of Submission: 28th November 2011
I declare that this is my own work, signed ____________________
Executive Summary
This report examines the benefits of Facebook to someone’s mind and well being. It will explore the benefits it offers to colleges and schools. It will examine why Facebook is so popular and how its popularity is still growing every day. It explores the benefits of all the useful applications and how people benefit from using them. It examines how privacy is not a big issue that other reports make it out to be and it examines how you control your privacy settings. It will explore the benefits of Facebook to businesses and how it can help boost their advertising, sales and communications. It will also examine the overall benefits that Facebook brings to people.
Table of Contents
Title Page..................................................................................... 1
Executive Summary..................................................................... 2
Table of Contents........................................................................ 3
Introduction................................................................................ 4...

...social-networking. Today, 65% of online adults use social-networking sites. (Madden, 2012) The most popular social-networking site today is Facebook. Facebook has lately been having a lot of controversy, especially in the workforce. The workforce is looking at individuals Facebook profiles to determine hirable status. If Facebook keeps interfering with citizens’ rights to be hired, soon there will be a drop of employment.
The means of social-networking, in the beginning, was a new means of communication for people all over the world. And to create so called “groups”; the groups would be for charities, supporting common causes, etc. (Lusted, 2011) Today, however social-networking has gone beyond that stature. Social-networking today is mostly used by young adults and teens. Facebook is used for communication between these classes of people, but also used to say what they want, so we thought. Today, people never know for sure exactly who is viewing their personal information online. Some college admissions personnel routinely check online profiles, of Facebook users, when deciding whether to accept a prospective student. (Lusted, 2011) Many employers do the same when trying to decide whether to hire applicants; and this is where the big issue of concern lies.
Today, when someone applies for a job, they are expected to re-vamp their Facebook profile and what he/she...